Wikia Search Launch

Wikia - creating communities

WIKIA, JIMMY WALES UNVEIL FIRST PUBLIC ALPHA OF OPEN SOURCE SEARCH PROJECT

Wikia Search officially online and seeking contributors to help build an open search engine; Wales to host conference call to detail project’s mission and current status

SAN MATEO, Calif. -- (BUSINESS WIRE) -- January 7, 2008 -- Wikia, Inc. ( http://www.wikia.com/ ) the leading provider of community resources for building and organizing free information on every topic, today announced that co-founder Jimmy Wales’ project to create a new search platform founded on open-source search protocols and human collaboration is now open to contributions from everyone.

The Wikia Search project, which is now live and can be found at http://www.wikia.com/ , officially launched in alpha form earlier today following a brief private testing period. In addition to executing basic search queries, users can also do traditional social networking activities, such as creating a personal profile, adding friends, sharing photos and managing privacy settings. Anyone is able to discuss and rank search results, write and edit Mini Articles and more.

“Today marks a significant, albeit initial step in our project to build a search engine,” said Jimmy Wales, co-founder and chairman, Wikia, Inc. “For the better part of the past year we’ve been working in the background to get to the stage we’re at today—an open-to-everyone alpha. We expect Wikia Search to be like fine wine in that it will get better and better as time goes by and more and more people contribute. I’ve said before that Internet search must be more open and transparent and today marks a major milestone in our mission to make it just that.”

Search Infrastructure Open to All The infrastructure delivering this alpha is also fully open, meaning that anyone—from home hobbyists, to entrepreneurs, to small startups can leverage the technology to build their own search engine. The open infrastructure includes a community organized compute cluster, open access to indexes, downloads of compressed crawl and index data, all built entirely on open source technologies including Grub, Nutch, Hadoop, hBase, and Foowi.

In November 2007 more than 2,400 CPUs were donated to the Internet Systems Consortium (http://www.isc.org/), a nonprofit 501(c)(3) public benefit corporation dedicated to supporting the infrastructure of the universal connected self-organizing Internet, for use to build a completely open general search index. Wikia has worked closely with the ISC to help organize and deploy the resources using various open source technologies. The cluster will be community organized and provide open access to all resources it produces including the resulting indexes and compressed crawl data.

“We believe that a completely open foundation must drive the future of search, following the same principles as the Internet and Web that it builds upon,” said Jeremie Miller, founder of Jabber and Wikia Search Architect. “Search is becoming one of the most powerful tools humankind has ever created—only transparency and open participation will protect these tools from abuse.”

The tools enable every searcher to share and participate in simple and familiar ways. The Wikia Search community is devoted to both transparency and privacy—meaning every ranking decision is open to the public and absolutely nothing is automatically stored about any user’s executed search queries in order to protect privacy.

To keep up with the latest developments around open source search or to volunteer, please visit the community wiki at: http://search.wikia.com .

A note on the difference between Wikia, Inc. and Wikipedia.org Wikia, Inc., is an independently operated company and therefore Wikia, Inc. and all of Wikia, Inc.’s subsequent projects, including “Wikia Search” are in no way related to Wikipedia.org or The Wikimedia Foundation.

About Wikia, Inc. Since Wikia’s launch in November 2004, more than 800,000 articles on 3,000 topics have been created and edited by over 200,000 registered users in 70 languages.

Wikia enables groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions that fall outside the scope of an encyclopedia. Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley launched Wikia in 2004 to provide community-based wikis inspired by the model of Wikipedia -- the free, open source encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales.

Wikia is committed to openness, inviting anyone to contribute web content. Authors retain their own copyrights and allow others to freely reuse their content under a variety of GNU and Creative Commons Licenses, allowing widespread distribution of knowledge and ideas.